dfather had a prescriptive right to flow, when lands were of
no value, and saw-mills were a public blessing.

There are numerous cases, within our own knowledge, where the very land
overflowed and ruined by some incorporated company, would, if allowed to
produce its natural growth of timber and wood, furnish ten times the
fuel necessary to supply steam-engines, to propel the machinery carried
by the water-power.

Not satisfied with obstructing the streams in their course, the larger
companies are, of late, making use of the interior lakes, fifty or a
hundred miles inland, as reservoirs, to keep back water for the use of
the mills in the summer droughts. Thus are thousands of acres of land
drowned, and rendered worse than useless; for the water is kept up till
Midsummer, and drawn off when a dog-day climate is just ready to
convert the rich and slimy sediment of the pond into pestilential
vapors. These waters, too, controlled by the mill-owners, are thus let
down in floods, in Midsummer, to overflow the meadows and corn-fields of
the farmer, or the intervals and bottom-lands below.

Now, while we would never advocate any attack upon the rights of
mill-owners, or ask them to sacrifice their interests to those of
agriculture, it surely is proper to call attention to the injury which
the productive capacity of the soil is suffering, by the flooding of our
best tracts, in sections of country where land is most valuable. Could
not mill-owners, in many instances, adopt steam instead of water-power,
and becoming land-_draining_ companies, instead of land-_drowning_
companies; at least, let Nature have free course with her gently-flowing
rivers, and allow the promise to be fulfilled, that the earth shall be
no more cursed with a flood.

We would ask for the land-owner, simply equality of rights with the
mill-owner. If a legislature may grant the right to flow lands, against
the will of the owner, to promote manufactures, the same legislature may
surely grant the right, upon proper occasion, to remove dams, and other
obstructions to our streams, to promote agriculture. The rights of
mill-owners are no more sacred than those of land-owners; and the
interests of manufactures are, surely, no more important than those of
agriculture.

We would not advocate much interference with private rights. In some of
the States, no special privileges have been conferred upon water-power
companies. They have been left to procure their rights